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The Former Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis was George H.R Bush’s competitor in 1988 election. He acknowledged Bush’s contribution to ending the Cold War.

On November 30, 2018, George H.R Bush, the 41^st President of the United States (1989 – 1993), passed away at the age of 94 at his home surrounded by his family.

In the telephone interview by the Associated Press, Gov. Michael Dukakis, Chairman of Boston Global Forum and Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation, expressed his admiration to Bush’s accomplishment. Although he never had a friendship with Bush, he thought him being a wise and thoughtful man. In addition, Dukakis praised Bush for being willing to work with Democrats and his effort in negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachëv to end the Cold War.

On December 1, World Leadership Alliance – Club de Madrid is celebrating its President Vaira Vike-Freiberga 85^th birthday.

Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga is the former President of Latvia (1999-2007) and the President of the World Leadership Alliance – Club de Madrid (WLA-CdM) since 2014.

Since the end of her presidency in July 2007, Dr. Vike-Freiberga has been actively participating as an invited speaker at a wide variety of international events. She is a member, board member or patron of 29 international organizations, including the WLA-CdM, the Council of Women World Leaders, the International Criminal Court Trust Fund for Victims, the European Council on Foreign Relations, as well as four Academies. Among her international activities, in December 2007, she was appointed by the European Council’s Vice-Chair of the Reflection Group on the long-term future of Europe. From 2011 to 2012, she chaired the High-level Group on Freedom and Pluralism of the Media in the EU.

Regardless of her age, she continues to make outstanding contribution to the world. She is also a member of Boston Global Forum’s Board of Thinkers. On May 15, 2018, Dr. Vike-Freiberga was honored as the Distinguished Innovation Leader for her distinguished work in the humanities and social sciences by Boston Global Forum and Michael Dukakis Institute.

The New York Times gathered five big thinkers in a room at a bar for a three-hour dinner to discuss the future of healthcare and humanity under the moderation of Mark Jannot.

 

The five guests at the table were:

• Catherine Mohr is an engineer, a medical doctor, Vice President of Strategy at Intuitive Surgical (makers of the Da Vinci surgical robot), and President of the Intuitive Foundation;
• Siddhartha Mukherjee is a physician, biologist, oncologist and author of “The Gene: An Intimate History” and “The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer,” which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction;
• Regina Barzilay is a professor at MIT and a member of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory;
• George Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of personalgenomes.org, an open-access information resource on human genomic, environmental and trait data;
• Jennifer Egan is a writer whose most recent novel, “Manhattan Beach,” was awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for excellence in fiction.

The topic of the talk varied into many sections from genes editing to AI.

The first topic of genes started with a question: Will we engineer our children, and ourselves?

The idea of editing the sperm cell, collecting the best traits and removing all the diseases fascinates people. “You could edit the sperm, change that allele so that all sperm are healthy, and your offspring will be fine. All sperm come from spermatogonia stem cells in the man’s testes. You can use editing tools and work on stem cells in Petri dishes so that you’re removing the bad allele and replacing it with DNA that has been designed and synthesized on computer-controlled machines,” said Professor George Church.

However, it has not been done since scientists have not figured out the way to apply stem cells and sperm cell. Mukherjee claimed that they edited a gene in human blood stem cells to enable therapy for some form of leukemia, then they encountered technical issues, but the potential of the system is remarkable. In addition, mature people can also have their genes edited by adding and removing DNA parts. Nonetheless, in such complex system, all the adjustment can bring some unexpected side effects we can’t control.

What are the most interesting applications for AI in medicine right now?

In Barzilay’s opinion, the interesting application of AI is the ability to personalize user experience by collecting our data. She told the story of how she found out she had breast cancer. Many questions she had at the time could have been answered by AI better than human doctor who would make you wait for months to diagnose the symptoms in such an unnecessary procedure.

With the help of AI, medicine can be transformed, as it can provide early detection and save many lives. However, it might take time, but with thorough training through a huge amount of database, record, AI could reach human level in diagnosis. “To achieve this, it isn’t just recognizing what is in the picture or the sounds; these algorithms need to understand the context, where you are in the procedure, what’s going to happen and what should ordinarily happen next,” said Catherine Mohr.

Will we know too much?

As the data collected is going to be enormous, we can even actually make even deeper clinical assessment for example life expectancy. This might result in privacy problems as the body can be known too well. Your own data could also go beyond your control and fall into any hand.

Will we live longer and happier?

According to Mohr, as our living condition improves, healthcare is much better, diseases are predicted earlier, it is a fact that the longevity will be extended. However, there might still be a chance that we could only extend the weaker part of our life, which is not what we desire; secondly, our time could be longer but living too long means using more resources of the planet.

Regarding people’s happiness, “we already confront so much less death than people did, say, before antibiotics. But does having fewer of those losses really make us happier?” asked Egan.

Mohr also claimed what bring joy to life were working toward the acquisition of new skills and the ability to make choices for yourself. However, if we live in an era when machines do most of thing, we will have none of this. So what will we do with those machines? We will need an ethical framework for using machines for peace and safety, which is what Michael Dukakis Institute is doing with the AIWS Initiative.

The Open Data Institute (ODI) recently published a report on UK’s geospatial data to address the opportunities and challenges. This report emphasizes the value of map data to autonomous technology.

The report, carried in UK, suggests that the publishing of map data owned by Apple, Google and Uber would result in major development of technologies like autonomous cars and drones.

So far, Internet giants like Google Maps, Uber… have collected a huge amount of geospatial data which shows addresses, boundaries from the services provided by this data. However, the data was not accessible to public. It is argued by the ODI that it should be considered as a part of “national infrastructure”.

The data can remarkably facilitate a bloom of transportation that brings about approximately £11 billion pounds worth of income, including access to schools or hospitals for remote areas, advancements in commercial satellites, connected cars and drones, etc.

Despite the considerable benefits, it is difficult to mandate the access to data as there is no incentive to make these firms give up their competitive advantages. The ODI recommends a politic support of the government to make it possible in the near future.

Sharing geospatial data will facilitate governments in their public services. The sixth layer of the AIWS 7-layer Model developed by the Michael Dukakis Institute is studying how to apply AI effectively to public services and policy-making.

Ever since the emergence of AI, while it has benefited us greatly in many areas, there are also doubtful prejudices toward AI, especially about how biased AI algorithms are. This concern has opened many discussions of AI ethics to seek common voices from diverse cultures.

However, biases in AI are not likely to completely disappear, since the same biases exist without AI. These discussions should focus on how to make AI trustworthy.

In fact, all the opinions we have on AI are biased. The media tends to give readers shocking experiences; hence, we usually hear more about bad examples than good ones. The press cultivates fear among us while trust is what we need. Instead of trying to prevent from being unfair, we should learn how to help AI to make the right decision.

Another key aspect to building trust is transparency. For instances, firms can take part in AI Ethics challenges initiated by Ministry of Economics Affair and Employment’s AI Steering Group of Finland. The challenges encourage them to write down their ethical codes of AI development.

Beside, it is essential that there are state-laws for how and why an AI is developed. Companies should be active in the discussion and keep their regulators about the achievements they have made.

In general, the current development of AI is not transparent enough to earn trust from people. With rules and orders, what the AIWS is working on, or ethical frameworks, which Michael Dukakis is building with AIWS Initiative, we can take a step closer to transparency and ethics in AI development.

“I think we’re better off thinking about how to both build smarter machines and make sure AI is used for the well-being of as many people as possible,” Professor Yoshua Bengio said in the interview with MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for AI, Will Knight.

Yoshua Bengio is well-known for being an expert in deep learning since the day deep learning was just an academic curiosity. He is a professor at University of Montreal, also the co-founder of Element AI in 2016 which has built a successful company helping firms explore AI applications.

In the interview with Will Knight, Mr. Bengio shared that AI will be the game changer to improve people’s lives everywhere. Yet, a few notes were taken about how AI should be developed.

Firstly, the democracy in AI research might lead to power concentration as big companies tend to get more and more powerful due to people’s priority. Whereas “it’s dangerous to have too much power concentrated in a few hands,” said Professor Yoshua.

Secondly, there is a need of establishing laws and treaties to prevent lethal uses of AI in addition, and set up a defensive system to prevent it as some countries can secretly develop AI weapons.

Furthermore, to achieve a human-level AI that satisfy human’s need in long term, we also need a long-term strategy as well as investment. And machine learning will be the foundation to make a major leap in AI innovation. “We need to be able to extend it do things like reasoning, learning casualty and exploring the world”, said Professor Yoshua. As machines are not able to project themselves in different circumstances, they need model. Hence, we need machines to be able to discover these casual models, enable them to learn from their mistakes.

To avoid casualty, the research of AI needs to follow certain set of rules to keep AI development under control. This is what the AIWS 7-layer Model is developing.